Thoughts on Money

Neither he nor the others feel that the hunched shoulders and housing insecurity of their youth were good for their art. The “La Bohème” portrait of impoverished painters and poets was after all a description, not a prescription. “And at least they could afford the garret,” Jacobs-Jenkins says. “In New York, forget it.”

“conventional budgeting methods rely on restriction, discipline, and perfectionism in a way that doesn’t work for people. They ignore an important truth about money: it’s meant to be spent.”

after writing about money for a decade, what have I figured out about money, you ask? financial security isn't a number, it’s a relationship with "enough."

no number will ever feel like enough when your sense of security is tied to one. you hit the milestone, the goalpost moves, you blame yourself for moving it.

Time matters. So much of the rat race that squeezes your free time means you have to spend loads of money on convenience purchases (woke up too late for the bus, had to take an Uber; no time to make dinner from scratch; etc) but even more importantly, if you do not have ample free time, you cannot learn how to be satisfied.

Security is fundamentally about being able to hold and stay in the tension of uncertainty without compulsively resolving it or dispelling it.

We need to remember that the market is not the economy, and the economy is not the market. And the economy makes me very worried about food banks. Children are hungry, people are hungry. And when kids can’t eat they can’t pay attention in school, and if they can’t pay attention in school they can’t be good students; they can’t move forward in the... See more